Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

‘Let us retire to an inn or public house, Raymond – a quiet one – and please, allow me to buy you some beer in recompense for this wasted evening.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t wasted, Eleanor,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Your face! This is one of the best nights out I’ve had in ages.’

He started to laugh again, and, much to my surprise, I found myself joining in. It was amusing that I had so comprehensively misunderstood the genre of music being performed. I had a lot to learn about music, I realized, and it would be important to do so in order to interact appropriately with the musician.

‘Have you heard of Johnnie Lomond and the Pilgrim Pioneers?’ I asked him. He shook his head. ‘Why?’ he said. I took out my phone and navigated to the singer’s web page. Raymond scrolled down for a few moments, reading the text, then popped in his earphones and listened for a minute or two.

‘Sounds shit,’ he said dismissively, handing me back my phone. This from a man in a skull sweatshirt!

‘Really?’ I said.

‘He’s got a standard-issue beard, an expensive guitar he doesn’t know how to play and a fake American accent. Trying to make out he’s from the South … aye right, South Lanarkshire,’ Raymond said, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth with a smirk. I wasn’t sufficiently well-informed to be able to agree or disagree, so I kept quiet. Either way, I needed to know at least a few salient facts about popular music, and, recent aberrant opinions aside, I suspected that Raymond was my best source.

‘Do you know much about music, then?’ I asked, as we walked towards a pub which Raymond assured me was quiet – ‘A proper old man’s pub,’ he said, whatever that was.

‘Eh, aye, I guess,’ he said.

‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘Now please: tell me everything.’

25

IT WAS THE DAY of the concert. Everything was ready. I looked the part. I felt the part. I would speed up time if I could, to get to tonight more quickly. I’d found a way to help me move forward at last. A way to replace a loss with a gain.

The musician. It was luck that he’d come along at precisely the right time. It was fate that, after tonight, my Eleanor pieces would finally start to fit together.

How exquisite the anticipation – a pain, a churning pain inside me. I did not know how to assuage it – I felt, instinctively, that vodka would not work. I would simply have to bear it until we met, and that was the nature of this peculiar, blissful burden. Only a little longer to wait now, a matter of hours. Tonight, I was going to meet the man whose love would change my life.

I was ready to rise from the ashes and be reborn.

26

I AM NAKED, LYING ON the floor, looking at the underside of the table. The pale wood is unvarnished, and there is a faded stamp bearing the imprint ‘Made in Taiwan’. Some important items are lined up on the tabletop – I can’t see them, but I can sense them above me. This hideous table, blue melamine top, rickety legs, the varnish scraped off in places by decades of careless use. How many kitchens has this table been in, before it found its way to me?

I imagine a hierarchy of happiness; first purchased in the 1970s, a couple would sit here, dining on meals cooked from brand-new recipe books, eating and drinking from wedding china like proper grown-ups. They’d move to the suburbs after a couple of years; the table, too small to accommodate their growing family, passes on to a cousin newly graduated and furnishing his first flat on a budget. After a few years, he moves in with his partner and rents the place out. For a decade, tenants eat here, a whole procession of them, young people mainly, sad and happy, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, lovers. They’d serve fast food here to fill a gap, or five stylish courses to seduce, carbohydrates before a run and chocolate pudding for broken hearts. Eventually, the cousin sells up and the house clearance people take the table away. It languishes in a warehouse, spiders spinning silk inside its unfashionable rounded corners, bluebottles laying eggs in the rough splinters. It’s given to another charity. They gave it to me, unloved, unwanted, irreparably damaged. Also the table.

The things are all laid out. Painkillers (twelve packets of twenty-four tablets, prescribed and carefully hoarded); bread knife (hardly used, shark’s teeth ready to bite); drain cleaner (‘cuts through all blockages, even hair and grease’ – also flesh and internal organs). This table, this table where I have never sat with another person and shared a bottle of wine. This kitchen, where I have never cooked for anyone but myself. Lying here on the floor, corpse-like, I can feel spiky crumbs sticking to the bare backs of my arms, my buttocks, my thighs, my heels. It is cold. I wish I were a corpse. Not long, not long now.